The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2. After a couple of month good work towards the 11.2 we’re enjoying a very nice distribution which I already like very much. It is running on most of my machines for a few weeks now. I have already seen some SUSE Linux distros going gold over the time I spent with SUSE and my personal gut feeling tells me this is one of the more remarkable versions.

As usual it comes with tons of new up to date software and also the installation runs smoothly, please read the announcement for all the details, but what for me the most remarkable with 11.2 is that it is a real community openSUSE distro.

There is so much effort visible in 11.2 which was achieved through our growing community rather than just the SUSE people. We had a lots of requests in openFATE suggesting features, we discussed some of them quite heated, others were no-brainer. We again had lots of testers who hammered the alphas and betas and reported big and small bugs. On the openSUSE Conference many discussions about the upcoming distribution took place which were inspiring. We were able to utilize the powerful openSUSE Buildservice to build the distro together with all packagers very effectively. That improved the quality of our packages again. Another very visible thing for me personally is the desktop artwork which was done in best cooperation with upstream – and it looks so great that I hesitate to start applications which cover the desktop all day 😉

It is really exciting to see how things come together on the way to community distribution, and how far we got with openSUSE 11.2. I am happy about that and I am proud to be part of this and like to say thank you for every little bit you might have contributed. I believe that the message that openSUSE is your community distribution has arrived.

Of course openSUSE continues to be open for your ideas, the distribution can be the vehicle to power up ideas from a little application to huge software projects. The openSUSE project is the powerful community behind which helps to make ideas reality. And all that based on the principles of free software! I am really happy today and very excited about what future will bring 🙂

openSUSE 11.2 is out the door and it looks great – be sure to get your copy while it’s hot! One of the really great features of 11.2 is the opportunity to deploy the live media to USB in no time. Thanks to hybrid iso and clicfs you can carry around your persistent openSUSE 11.2 and use it wherever you are. What does persistence mean? Changes you do to the live media are preserved across reboots and you have a real operating system in a pocket without any restrictions. Isn’t that easy?

3. Utilize fdisk to prepare an empty 0x83 partition for persistence from the remaining space on /dev/sdX, i.e. /dev/sdX2 (you should have at least a 2GB USB stick to be able to do this). The 0x83 partition /dev/sdX2 doesn’t need to be formatted with any filesystem – Kiwi will take care of this on first boot fully automatically.

That’s it! More detailed information about persistent 11.2 LiveUSB setup can be found on the wiki

Have a lot of fun!

Additional Hint: If you happen to have an installed version of openSUSE 11.2 already and prefer a GUI method to deploy the hybrid iso to USB flash media, you also may use kiwi-tools-imagewriter instead of dd.

This build was delayed more than usual because we worked on OOo-3.1.1 packages for openSUSE-11.2. The next beta2 build should be available one week from now. The current plans are to provide the final build in the middle of December. Though, the release will most likely slip to January.

Since a few days, the OBS webbclient is now able to handle requests which means that you can accept/decline requests concerning you or revoke own requests. Furthermore you see a complete diff for submit requests. For me, it was my first experience with Ruby on Rails but it seems to be very exciting. So the usability is not perfect now but i will working on it.

Thanks to hard work of faculties and IEEE student branch of DA_IICT, ifest turned out to be good event. Here are some of the pictures from the event:

Li-f-e at iFest @ DA-IICT

openSUSE Education team from Baroda: Samyak Bhuta, Biswajyoti Mahanta and me, were all wearing either Li-f-e or openSUSE t-shirts, many students got the latest edition of Li-f-e based on openSUSE 11.2 installed on their USB sticks. DA-IICT will also be hosting iso image and presentations on their internal network for everyone on campus to download.

The sessions were interactive demonstrations of Li-f-e, http://susestudio.com, and Blender(by Biswa) the presentations openSUSE-Edu-Li-f-e.pdf and Blender.pdf used are available here.

We’ll do a launch party in our Nürnberg office on Thursday Nov 12, 7-10pm CET. We’ll try to attract people from the Nürnberg area and show them what’s new in openSUSE 11.2, hand out some media and show openSUSE 11.2 in action. Additional we’ll have a number of outstanding openSUSE folks from SUSE attending and looking forward having interesting discussion. With openSUSE 11.1 we opened up for the first time the “internal” release party to the public. This time we’d like to go one step further and having the launch party just for people interested in openSUSE. We appreciate and invite of course any buddies interested in openSUSE from the Nürnberg office.

What about doing a launch party in your area and share openSUSE 11.2 with others? Just add your party to the list of openSUSE launch parties.

The boosters team promised to talk about what happens in our sprints – the two week time boxes in which we work on our projects. The last sprint ended on october 27th and we still owe you what happened.

Please understand this little report as usual as an invitation to ask, comment, suggest things and of course fire up your editor and contribute if you like.
You find us on IRC in channel #opensuse-boosters or on the opensuse-boosters mailinglist.

In the last sprint a lot of discovering “how things are usally done with wediawiki” has happened, such as how wiki content
is sorted or how portals are used. That went in parallel to the discussion Rupert started on the wiki mailinglist, good enough that both efforts go combined now – everybody is asked to join the discussion on the wiki list.

We also discovered that the media wiki update has not yet gone through, the problem was that our iChain plugin was broken with the new version of the Wiki. The squad will fix that.

We were still very much individually sitting around and fiddle with the Ruby on Rails framework to get on speed with it. For example the way how to integrate several Rails projects under one umbrella project was investigated.

The plan for the next sprint is to come to a first draft on how the new web structure should look like. We’re very much bound to our artists work, so if you are a screen designer, please get in touch with Robert to support him to direct the poor developer souls.

this squad was a bit understrength because of vacation and the upcomming 11.2.

Nevertheless they discovered a lot of dependencies in the OBS which are needed to set up the factory.o.o page. Some not so nice corners in the OBS were cleaned a bit which came to light when tom and Will were working to set up a test instance of the OBS.